Another way to understand JavaScript's array.reduce

If you've run the guantlet of array methods in JavaScript, you've probably hit this roadblock a few times:

Wait, how do I use the reduce function again?

I actually led a JS bootcamp with this topic for my college's Hack4Impact chapter (material 100% free-to-use here!). Questions on reduce have come up so many times, and I think I've finally found an explanation that clicks 😁 Hope it works for you too!

🎥 Video walkthrough

If you prefer to learn by video tutorial, this one's for you. You can fork this CodePen for the source material to follow along 🏃‍♂️

📝 Step-by-step cheatsheet

Let's walk our way to reduce by using what we know: good ole' for loops.

Here's an example. Say we have our favorite album on a CD (remember those? 💿), and our stereo tells us the length of each track in minutes. Now, we want to figure out how long the entire album is.

Here's a simplified approach for what we want to do:

// make a variable to keep track of the length, starting at 0
let albumLength = 0
// walk through the songs on the album...
album.songs.forEach(song => {
  // and add the length of each song to our running total
  albumLength += song.minutesLong
})

No too bad! Just loop over the songs, and accumulate the album runtime while we walk through the songs. This is basically the process you'd use in real life, tallying up the album length as you skip through the tracks on your stereo.

That word "accumulate" is pretty significant here though. In essence, we're taking this list of track lengths, and reducing them to a single accumulated number: the albumLength. This process of reducing to an accumulator should set off a light bulb in your head: 💡 we can use array.reduce!

Going from forEach to reduce

Let's try reduce-ifying our function from earlier. This is a simple, 4 step process:

1. Change forEach to reduce:

let albumLength = 0
album.songs.reduce((song) => {
  albumLength = albumLength + song.minutesLong
})

2. Move albumLength to the first parameter of the loop function, and the initial value (0) to the second parameter of reduce

// accumulator up here 👇
album.songs.reduce((albumLength, song) => {
  albumLength = albumLength + song.minutesLong
}, 0) // 👈 initial value here

3. Change albumLength = to a return statement. This isn't too different conceptually, since we're still adding our song length onto our "accumulated" album length:

album.songs.reduce((albumLength, song) => {
  // 👇 Use "return" instead of our = assignment
  return albumLength + song.minutesLong
}, 0)

4. Retrieve the result of our reduce loop (aka our total album length). This is just the value returned:

const totalAlbumLength = album.songs.reduce((albumLength, song) => {
  return albumLength + song.minutesLong
}, 0)

And that's it! 🎉

So wait, why do I even need reduce?

After all that work, reduce might feel like a slightly harder way of writing a for loop. In a way... it kind of is 😆

It offers one key benefit though: since reduce returns our total, function chaining is a lot easier. This may not be a benefit you appreciate right away, but consider this more complex scenario:

// Say we have this array of arrays,
// and we want to "flatten" everything to one big array of songs
const songsByAlbum = [
  ['Rap Snitches Knishes', 'Beef Rap', 'Gumbo'],
  ['Accordion', 'Meat Grinder', 'Figaro'],
  ['Fazers', 'Anti-Matter', 'Krazy World']
]
let songs = []
songsByAlbum.forEach(albumSongs => {
  // "spread" the contents of each array into our big array using "..."
  songs = [...songs, ...albumSongs]
})

This isn't too hard to understand. But what if we want to do some more fancy array functions on that list of songs?

// Ex. Make these MF DOOM songs titles all caps
let songs = []
songsByAlbum.forEach(albumSongs => {
  songs = [...songs, ...albumSongs]
})
const uppercaseSongs = songs.map(song => song.toUppercase())

All caps when you spell the man name. Rest in peace MF DOOM

This is fine, but what if we could "chain" these 2 modifications together?

// grab our *final* result all the way at the start
const uppercaseSongs = [
  ['Rap Snitches Knishes', 'Beef Rap', 'Gumbo'],
  ['Accordion', 'Meat Grinder', 'Figaro'],
  ['Fazers', 'Anti-Matter', 'Krazy World']
]
// rewriting our loop to a "reduce," same way as before
.reduce((songs, albumSongs) => {
  return [...songs, ...albumSongs]
}, [])
// then, map our songs right away!
.map(song => song.toUppercase())

Woah! Throwing in a reduce, we just removed our standalone variables for songsByAlbum and songs entirely 🤯

Take this example with a grain of salt though. This approach can hurt the readability of your code when you're still new to these array functions. So, just keep this reduce function in your back pocket, and pull it out when you could really see it improving the quality of your code.

Also, if this helped you out, you can learn more about ❤️ Hack4Impact here.